The first expansion to The Last Federation, titled Betrayed Hope, arrives this Friday along with the free version 2.0 upgrade for the base game. TLF has been a huge hit for us this year, with its unique blend of 4x strategy, simulation, and turn-based tactics.

Betrayed Hope is perhaps the most massive expansion we have ever done for any of our games, which is really saying something considering the scope of the AI War expansions. This expansion lets you freaking reverse the entire premise of the game (build a federation from the shadows) if you want (be a full planetary power and fight front-on 4x-style).

Here's the trailer for the new expansion:

For more information about the expansion, please see the Betrayed Hope page.

But for now let's talk about what has changed between versions 1.0 and 2.0 of The Last Federation. First of all, the release notes from version 1.0 to 2.0 are over 61,000 words long. That is quite literally the length of a respectable novel.

Here are a few key changes:

Auto-resolve option for battles.

Tons of improvements to GUI clarity, explanatory tooltips, etc.

Permadeath made optional (and off by default).

Awesome new ship graphics for during battles.

New Burlust "Turmoil" mechanic.

New ways to persuade races to join the federation.

New actions that NPC-races take when it seems appropriate to them.

Six new quests.

Added player actions to support a ground invasions, oppose them, or simply start bombing stuff independently.

Added the Ark and the Mire, two randomly seeded unique buildings that help make each game different.

Major improvements to how RCI, Attitude, and Influence numbers work so that they make more sense to the player.

Major revisions to widely-disliked missions like "Clean up AFA", "Deliver Spacefaring Technology", etc.

Radical shifts to solar map pacing and many revisions to how actions work to increase player agency.

New moddable "Bullet Pattern" engine that allows some really crazy new behaviors for enemy shots. Tons of new and revised bullet patterns.

You can now do practice combats at the black market to try out tactics or just enjoy blowing up tons of ships.

Substantial CPU/GPU performance improvements.

Rebalancing both in combat and on the solar map.

Multitudinous bugfixes.

And a whooole lot more.

Version 2.0 won't officially launch until the 14th, because we're still in super-final-almost-done polish mode for these new features and changes. However, the current steam version, and current official version in our own updater, are already updated to (at the time of this writing) version 1.900, which includes all of the changes noted above (just minus the last bit of polish we still are working on based on last player feedback).

Enjoy!

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Nice trailer there! I think you've summed up the new mechanics and such pretty well.

New modes alone will probably attract players to the game that may have thought there wasnt enough variety to it originally. Particularly when compared to AI War, hah.

Not to mention changes to old stuff. I certainly found alot of those to be very welcome changes. Though I still think the "smuggle spacefaring" mission needs a good bit of refining, for pretty much the reason that Chemical Art stated in the other thread. That mission is still likely to frustrate first-time players.

Other than that though... I agree that everything seems pretty much good to go. No major bugs right now or anything.

...also it's really surreal to see the the bullet stuffs I put together appear in an actual trailer alongside lotsa cool features and additions and stuff.

If you guys had more free time available, I would suggest doing a playthrough yourselves of whatever mode in the game, since watching something like that is a great help for new players considering the tough learning curve of the game. As it is, I'm still surprised that there just arent more video stuffs of the game as it is. And what I have found is very outdated at this point. I've thought of doing one myself, but I'm not very good at that. I could explain the hell out of the combat side, but for the solar map stuff I'd probably just leave anyone watching more confused.... perhaps someone else might be willing to give it a go?

Either way though, good luck with the launch! Eager to see how it goes.

And Misery, I'm sure it must be surreal, but you did such a fantastic job with those it's a little surreal for me still seeing them, too! I look forward to working together in the future more on those sorts of things.

I wish I did have more time to do an LP, but there's just so much stuff to do on SBR at the moment. THAT one I will be doing lots of LPs for for sure, though.

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Hm, I'm curious, are you guys intending on that new game being an even bigger project than TLF was? Since that game started out as a pretty large one overall. It sounds like you've got a pretty long development cycle planned for this new one.

TLF didn't really start out as big as it ended up, heh. Part of what made TLF take so very long to make, additionally, was the fact that we had to keep redoing the combat modes so completely. That just sucked up enormous amounts of time. Possibly two months, but at least one.

SBR is a single-mode sort of game, like Civ or most other 4x titles, so we're not trying to balance minigames inside a larger framework, which is a huge relief. That lets us stay a lot more focused. All in all we're planning on a timeline similar to the TLF development time, but without all that faffing about with combat models. Part of that extra time is going towards having LOTS of polish/balance time prior to 1.0, and part of that is going towards making this an even larger game, yes.

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SBR is a single-mode sort of game, like Civ or most other 4x titles, so we're not trying to balance minigames inside a larger framework, which is a huge relief. That lets us stay a lot more focused. All in all we're planning on a timeline similar to the TLF development time, but without all that faffing about with combat models. Part of that extra time is going towards having LOTS of polish/balance time prior to 1.0, and part of that is going towards making this an even larger game, yes.

Ahahahahahaha... I crack me up. Perhaps I'll go cry now.

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Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

SBR is a single-mode sort of game, like Civ or most other 4x titles, so we're not trying to balance minigames inside a larger framework, which is a huge relief. That lets us stay a lot more focused. All in all we're planning on a timeline similar to the TLF development time, but without all that faffing about with combat models. Part of that extra time is going towards having LOTS of polish/balance time prior to 1.0, and part of that is going towards making this an even larger game, yes.

Ahahahahahaha... I crack me up. Perhaps I'll go cry now.

XD you were so sure about everything and now look the games developments is temporarily on hiatus hindsight's just great isn't it?.